


My Life, My Love, My Lady

by dogpoet



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Character Study, Enterprise, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-20
Updated: 2009-07-20
Packaged: 2017-10-03 16:53:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dogpoet/pseuds/dogpoet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's only one lady in Captain Kirk's life, and her name is the <i>Enterprise</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Life, My Love, My Lady

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [My Life, My Love, My Lady](https://archiveofourown.org/works/856964) by [dogpoet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dogpoet/pseuds/dogpoet), [ivypriest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivypriest/pseuds/ivypriest)



"Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction."  
\- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 

He was born three times. Once, at warp speed, the shuttlecraft hurtling from the docking bay of the _Kelvin_ as the ship headed toward oblivion. The second time, as he emerged from his mother's womb, crying from the wrenching loss, hitting the pressurized air of the craft that protected him from the abortive, empty air of space. The third time, when his mother brought him to Earth, and he finally breathed its atmosphere. He knows where he felt safest: not on Earth, but in the _Kelvin_, before anything went wrong, before anyone died, when his parents still looked in each other's eyes. When his father laid a hand on his mother's belly and talked to him through her skin. If he tries, he can almost remember that voice.

Deep in his cells, he can recall the Kelvin's warp drive being knocked out, just when he was telling his mother it was time for her to release him. He could sense her panic as he floated inside her, the shields failing around them, phaser blasts outside. Siren alarms, shouts of the crew. Explosions. Fire. _Go now! Take off immediately!_, words he has remembered all his life. They guide him like a mantra.

He flooded out at the same moment the shuttle left the ship in blasts of fire, his father dying so he might live. Born to speed and space and eternity with nothing outside but cold and racing air and flashes of light amid darkness.

His father's last words: _I love you_. Then silence.

Those words mean death; he never says them to anyone.

His father is out there somewhere. Matter is not created or destroyed, only altered. He may be a tempest of dust, a nebula floating in blackness, a sea-change into something rich and strange...

He was born to speed. He was born in movement. He was born swinging wildly past stars and hurtling past asteroids. He was born with the shatter of shrapnel hitting the shuttlecraft hull. As worlds exploded, he was ripped from the only home he ever knew. Stars streaked by and time bent him to its will. There were fiery threads of heat and light. And now, he cannot live without those things. He couldn't go fast enough in a stolen car, careening down a dirt road, not even sliding over the only cliff in Iowa. Stillness makes him dizzy. He prefers the precipice, hanging from a Romulan drill whose bracts of metal slice through clouds and earth and rock, creating a black hole that ever takes and never gives. He has the cell memory of the trembling galaxy where speed and movement mean life.

The _Enterprise_ is his home. She moves with grace, and in her hands he feels safe. With eternities of nothingness outside, with stars threatening to nova, with time feeling shockwaves and vibrating with the effort of staying true. It's cold and inhuman beyond her walls, but inside, he's as protected as a baby in a womb.

Odysseus belonged in motion, too, not with Penelope, whom he would leave again soon. He preferred one-eyed giants, his men turned to swine, deadly winds and whirlpools that killed his men like flies. He was tied to his ship, he'd go down with her, her voice as lovely and alluring as the Sirens themselves, as deep as the wine-dark sea.

He loved her from the moment he saw her, when he rode his motorcycle across a hummocky field in Riverside, leaving his old life behind for something new. He loved her even before she was complete. He loved her when she was only sheets of metal, with a crew of hundreds putting her together piece by piece, their arc welders streaming sparks and noise. Electric drills tightening bolts, pitting steel against steel. Before she'd ever caught air and sailed. When she was earthbound and still. Before she had taken a breath of life.

He only rarely sees her hull, its iridescent gleam against the blackness of space. He remembers the first real sight of her from the window of the shuttle, sitting next to Bones, drugged out of his mind, but cognizant enough to know she was the one. His stomach leapt to his throat not from sickness but from joy. At first, when their relationship was new, he wanted to go faster than fast, maximum warp, to ride her hard, and take her where no one had ever taken a ship before. He wanted to test her limits, make her bow to him. He did those things, and many a time he almost lost her.

When she's in danger, being hit with Klingon phasers, he feels it in his gut, like someone's ripping at his organs, trying to kill him where he stands. Spock would tell him it's illogical to feel a bond with a machine, even though the Vulcan once melded with a robot and reported affinity. But he feels as bonded to her as he is to Spock, their minds connected over time and space, wherever they are. There is logic to it, after all, because to him, the ship is more than her parts, more than her shimmering white exterior. She's his crew, and he would protect them with his life. He has joined them in marriage, officiating their vows, vows as sacred as the ones he exchanged with the _Enterprise_ on the day he became her Captain. He promised to love, honor, and cherish. The crew he's lost are parts of himself. She dies a little, too, with each of them.

When M-5 tried to take over her mind, he knew. He talked to her like he'd talk to a lover, or an old friend, placing his hand on her skin, telling her, "Everything's going to be all right." And she listened. She heard him, and responded. He trusted her even in the throes of circuitry madness.

He knows her blind. He can move from the bridge to the mess hall to the science labs to the shuttlebays to recreation, all without thinking, without looking. He knows how many paces between his quarters and Spock's. "Walk with me," he says to Spock, as he takes his nightly tour of the ship. They always go together, beginning with the fore and aft docking ports, then peeking in at the phaser banks and the landing bay, verifying that there are no unusual sounds from the intercoolers or the vents.

He likes her smells, first of new carpet and plastic and metal, and after a few years, things that are familiar: engine oil and ozone and the faint dilithium fumes, which on first scent are unpleasant, but he has learned to love them because they mean the ship is running smoothly, her engines processing fuel. Sometimes he leans against the engine room walls and listens to the thrumming of her heart and veins. He sleeps better when his Engineer reassures him, "Aye, Captain, she's hummin' along." He trusts Scotty to look out for Engineering, the thrusters and the warp nacelles, but he checks every square foot of the rest, which some might say is going above and beyond the call of duty, but he thinks of it as looking after the most important person in his life.

They always stop in the botanical garden, where there is an ever-present drone from the thrusters, and Spock likes to hover solicitously over the new plant specimens. The lift takes them up again to the main decks where there is more human life than machine. In recreation, they find late night swimmers, fencers, boxers, and treadmill runners. The Officers' Lounge is scattered with night-cap drinkers, or desultory games of chess. He and his first officer pause on the bridge and the observation deck before passing through the corridors of crew quarters on their way to bed.

She has taken him to places he never dreamed he'd see. He marvels at it all, looking out on planets with silicon-based life forms, with sentient flora, and languages that sound like bells and music, places where many known laws of physics do not apply. She has led him to accept truths he once denied. She insists on a world of possibility, of chance and collision (even of fate), the variety and multitude of life, and sometimes he believes in God because how else could all this exist? There's a miracle in the silver singing of ice cliffs and in the diving ravines of ancient stone. Planets of glittering minerals and no trace of life. Beauty in their stillness and distance, in their proud rotations undertaken for no one.

When he goes out in a suit, tethered by life-support-cable, to look at her battle scars and examine the damage to her hull, the loneliness is terrible, even if 100 meters away, a whole crew walks and talks and loves. Even if he can touch her hull and feel her fire beneath his glove, he hears only his own breath and heartbeat. Then Spock's voice comes over the comm like a lifeline pulling him back from the dark, vast reaches of space where he knows his molecules could be split into their elements.

They've grown old together. They may die together, facing down an inferno of exploding stars, a conflagration of molten glass and filaments of fire, or the dark interior of another ship bent on destruction. The universe itself may collapse to a spot of infinite density and zero volume. Worlds separated by the fabric of time may meet and all his selves collide, and his parallel universe ships may emerge like galleons from the night, pale and mysterious, all speeding toward their destinies in clouds of ashes, clouds of dust. He'll die one time, maybe more, going down with his ship, and then they'll both be reborn into a brand new world, unknown and untried, the days spread before them, celestial and divine.


End file.
